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121950-the-free-to-play-thread-page-2
Page 1, Page 2 Content ok so times 15 by 40 subs | |} ---- Stop being a troll. | |} ---- ---- You don't know how Credd works. | |} ---- ---- Source? | |} ---- I never seen a bigger i just pulled a statement straight of my arse statement than this one. | |} ---- Credd is only generated when someone buys it. The game does not generate it like cash from a vendor when someone clicks buy. A server CAN run out of it, and earlier, Entity had no Credd listed. You cannot have Credd without someone buying it with real money first. | |} ---- ---- I'm pretty sure those numbers already contain those revenues. They made 5,5 bln Won in Q4 in total. | |} ---- ---- That a lot of people came back and decided to buy a CREDD with their plat. If the population is stagnant or falling, that wouldn't happen, since CREDD as a commodity isn't tied to player population, just people paying extra. If it says anything, it says that F2P probably won't work, since your population that wants to play for free is coming close at this moment to outstripping the population willing to pay extra for them to be there. That's the sublime thing about the CREDD system, as a F2P system, it is self-regulating and carries few of the drawbacks of actual F2P. In an F2P system, the developer would need to "guess" how much money they need to make and they have to make sure that enough is behind the paywall to cover their costs. With CREDD, people can play for free, but only so many as the subscribing population will allow. Adding more free players above and beyond what people are even willing to pay for liquid currency, then, probably will not work. Especially if a traditional F2P transition will cause a lot of us who actually do have money (and don't want to spend more on general principle) to leave. But, as I said, you can have all the free players you want if they are a self-contained, self-sustaining entity. Install all the pay walls, ad banners, and content walls you want on them. Nerf them and force them to pay for buffs that will make them equal to a paying player. You can, in fact, have free players pay for themselves without directly paying for themselves, while still leaving the subscribers and CREDD users alone to enjoy the game as we have been enjoying it. You'd find quite a bit more support for that. NCSoft thinks 15$ a month is a fair price, and so do we. It's completely fair that if someone wants to play without paying, the price of playing without paying should fall squarely on them. They can make up revenue in other ways without becoming a drag on the subscribed playerbase. We who are already "chipped in", in whatever way, for this month deserve everything developed this month. And hey, if the people don't like those free conditions, it only costs a dinner for two at McDonalds per month to get whatever they develop that month and all the game we already enjoy. It's their choice not to. But if Entity is starting to run low on CREDD, it's a good indicator that we're already at "peak free player supported by subscribers". | |} ---- Right then no source to back your ridiculous claim, your credibility to troll ratio just dropped deeply into the full of shyte troll range. | |} ---- ---- Eve Online has been running the same system for years and they seem to be doing ok | |} ---- That's how I see it. Now that they buffed how much gold people can earn and the player base economy as well as the NPC prices themselves haven't inflated, most people are rich right now. Even though all I've been doing are PBGS I've earned around 4-5 plat from dailies, matches, selling loot. I can only imagine how much gold people who do dailies, ship hands, dungeons have. With current prices, do people who buy and sell CREDD really have to? Yesterday when I saw there was no CREDD for sale I stayed quiet about it for a good 3 hours, then I threw a fit in zone chat and someone put some up for sale. Basically I had to ask for CREDD....things are bad....real bad.... | |} ---- The biggest problem with these reports that everyone likes to use, is that everyone who is using them has no clue what the numbers actually represent. They're placed under "sales" and "revenue"........of what? Box sales, CREDD sales, Digital sales, channeling deals, partner deals? Do they include their subscription numbers in their "sales"? There's a lot of information missing from this report that's actually quite important in order to form a correct picture about how NCSoft, Carbine or WildStar is doing. Having worked for years in the F2P Business, I can tell you that these public reports only give you a glimpse of what is actually going on, and that such information is handed out extremely carefully as everything a stock-listed company does or announce has an influence on their market value. So whatever numbers they are putting out are filtered, and filtered hard. And the above mentioned points hold ground too. Many people came back to test out Drop 4. Are you telling me they all came back on a 7 day trial to test out the drop? Please...... They either all had CREDD, which means revenue for Carbine, or they all subbed for another month to test the game. | |} ---- ---- CREDD is also bought for plat; that's how the system works. If everyone has a certain amount of plat that is higher than it was, the price of CREDD should inflate (to match the real value of game currency). The only way this works is if there are literally no insurmountable gold sinks, which has been attested to not being the case especially in the case of the character chop shop. If any game factors are to blame besides having a lot more CREDD players return, about the only thing I can think of is that people may be busy doing veteran shiphands instead of doing what used to cost money, i.e. things they need to buy gear for and buying mounts, housing decor, etc. I don't think housing is the case; a lot of people have been working on those, and that should nominally spike the rate of people selling CREDD on the exchange. If we're running out of CREDD at all, we are surmounting even that. However, the basic principle stands. If people are willing to pay extra to get things, they will be buying CREDD. Few people who would actually buy CREDD to sell are at the point of saying "Nope, don't need to, have all the money I need." Certainly nobody I know has said that, and I actually know people who bought CREDD right after Drop 4 for housing purposes. Of course, all this is academic. I can tell you exactly why the CREDD exchange would have run out recently; it's because there was a bug shortly after the release of Protostar Initiative that essentially made it impossible to sell CREDD on the exchange. That will have the market die on CREDD very quickly, especially of the value of plat dropped. However, if this continues, you'll have hit that peak. I've not heard it became a new normal, so it seems like there's still room for CREDD players. There are, however, only a certain number of people willing to spend more real money in the pursuit of goods, and we're apparently near the ceiling where that group can support the free-playing population. On the other hand, I hadn't heard that Entity's CREDD prices spiked, and you'd expect the price of CREDD to skyrocket before actually running out of CREDD. | |} ---- ---- Careful - He bites | |} ---- ---- +1 to this. Drop 4 was great because it got people back into the Dungeons and Adventures and helped to open up Raids If Drop 5 can do the same thing for PVP, then Wildstar will essentially secure a permanent and consistent player base. We knew back in November that the next few content Drops were going to be a critical time for Wildstar, and Drop 4 was an excellent way to get started on the right foot. Now, more than ever, there should be NO focus on F2P and ALL focus on content Drops. Carbine has proved to me that they can do it and I believe they can do it again | |} ---- Below are my opinions. Reason why CREDD is not B2P/F2P and can not be thought of as a messure. In order to take advantage of CREDD as a returning player: --Pay for ONE month sub, --If you have chars that are not 50 and are able to craft than you may need to pay for TWO months of Sub. --If you are new to the game than you're in a better position as you just pay for the game and get ONE month free while perhaps may have to sub for another month. CREDD will NEVER bring players back because if the player does not wish to buy ONE or TWO months of sub and are able to start grinding and crafting up the PLAT to buy more CREDD once he comes back than NO GO. Most players have this CREDD thing wrong! It's a good system to keep already sub players that wish to forgo subs to continue playing or bring in new players that have never played before. It's a complete BLOCKING WALL of HALT, can not enter or even try for old players that are trying to come back. I would like to come back to this game and level up my level 28 char so that I can grind and craft up some plat to buy CREDD. However I can't do that without buying about 2 months of sub to support the time it would take obtain the goal of buying CREDD and thus I won't even bother with it. That is why CREDD does not work. That is why you all are wrong to think CREDD promotes and handles the B2P aspects of the game. That is why you can't use CREDD as any sort of merssurement of how B2P/F2P would work in this game. This game is dying, and the Qrt reports shows that. This game may go B2P/F2P at some point in time if the investors say so. You all can fight it all you want, but all your fighting is for nought. I'm only here because I found a 7 day key in my email from last year. I love the playstyle of my medic class, and I love the beautiful world. None of that means anything in the end though because I already have access to other B2P/F2P games that are just as good and in some cases better. That's another issue with any game that charges a sub is that they have to go up against a fleet of B2P/F2P games that are doing what they're doing and sometimes even better. That is another reason why WS pops are down to their loyal fanboys and thus not a lot of ppl in the world. If WS was B2P than I'd consider coming back to the game and buy expansions and maybe some neat stuff out of a store from time to time. Either way it doesn't matter to me if WS stays sub or go with something else. Why? Because I already have more than enough great B2P/F2P games! ESO, RiFT, LOTRO, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, EQN, the list is huge and goes on and on and on and I don't even have enough time in my life for it all. Do you all really think that sub games will continue in the future? Folks... it's almost over with! Why would I spend: 59.99 dollars for the game, 155.88 for 12 month sub or 179.88 in time cards, 29.99 to 49.99 for a yearly expansion, and some money in fluffy cash shop... in order to play a sub game when I could spend 59.99 on B2P game, 29.99 to 49.99 for a yearly expansion, and some money in the cash shop (speaking for my self probably no more than 20 a year). BUT BUT they need all that money to fund the game and bring more content (which they will charge you 60 dollars for anyways hehe). LOL, no they don't. Game studios around the world has spent the last 40 years building multi year gaming projects, sold them at the same ol 50/60 dollar price, made back and than some money, and went to work on a new game or expansion to do it all over again and again and again. MMOs however came up with a great idea to make bank! Charging you all for enough money that you could have bought 5 to 7 games a year with! They put a spin on it and make you all think that it goes toward content which they will charge you for anyways when the expansion comes out. If they really needed 5+ games worth of extra money for their live MMO than why do they have 100s of millions in the bank and in some cases billions in the bank and why do they continue charging you all multi times for same content such as expansions. Wouldn't all that extra sub money be used up in DEV cost? LOL, you been fooled to think otherwise. Folks it's called profits (which they have the right to make), but where is all that paid for quality content that you expected for such a huge investment? Take note how MMO game studios around the world make bank, lay off instead of hiring game DEVs, shrink down the amount of content they give you for free throughout the year, and in some cases charge you for small expansions, while still charging you a sub, putting a unwanted cashs hop into the game, and still making bank. Just my opinion of course. :) I'm finish with paying insain money (5+ games worth a year) to be able to play ONE MMO (there was a time i had three multi year subs going). I will no longer be a slave to such a system and that is another reason why players are leaving sub games. Ask a normal console player why he dosn't play PC games such as MMOs and he'll tell you he'd rather spend all that money on a handfull of games per year instead of just one. All of the above are my opinions, and I do wish you all a lot of fun. I also hope wildstar will have a great many of good years ahead of it no matter what model it has. | |} ---- You seem to be worried about how much money is paid by the players to play. I'll make this easy for you: -There is a certain number of people who will pay to play the game. -There is a certain number of people who will buy a CREDD to play the game. -There is a certain number of people who will do neither, but will play the game if it is free. The one thing you know is that adding that third group will increase costs but not revenue, since they will be playing for free. So, if that's happening, and the second group isn't increasing, where do the increased shortfalls get made up? By increasing the rates on the first group. That money comes from somewhere. This is the problem with the argument about F2P, it's not free. B2P isn't either. It is fundamentally worse for players because it sets up a very disgusting decision, "Pay to win, or don't pay and suffer." Right now, I'm paying 15 dollars a month and getting everything developed. My wife and I cost more going to lunch at Chipotle. Considering I finish all the other 60 dollar games out there within a few days, and Wildstar's been holding my attention since open beta, I'm thinking it's been worth my money. Want to let free people in? Let them deal with a cash shop, let them buy boosts to catch up to us. We aren't the problem here, we're paid up. Not many of us are looking forward to making that decision. I know I certainly won't make that decision. I'll simply leave, and I'll take my money (which I will spend at the rate NCSoft thinks is fair right now) elsewhere. | |} ---- Show me the declining numbers. Q4 2014 =/= Q1 2015, when Drop 4 happened, when population started coming back. If the most populated server runs out of Credd it means that either A: there's a bug in the system with displaying/selling it, OR B: a bunch of people came back to the game and bought it. Credd cannot exist unless someone shells out $20 first and puts it on the market. Edit: Stupid smileys. | |} ---- So that's it? Your main criteria for a game is "it's free". Despite enjoying WildStar greatly, you're not willing to pay for it. Not sure what Cabrine or any studio could do for you. Once again, players are the problem. | |} ---- ---- How well do Western style MMO's do in Asian markets? Cash shop models work because it lets the people that want to pay more than the sub fee to do so. The ones that splurge once every few months aren't the target, it's the ones willing to spend several multiples of the sub fee that they snag. There are some nut-jobs in SW:TOR that claim to spend ~$1000/mo. Cash shop models backfire when their so-called convenience items are so good they're required (p2w). They also cost a lot of goodwill when they become the exclusive channel for cosmetics or the cosmetics they offer are significantly superior than those offered IG. Some people will go. Significantly more free players will join and populate the queues. A handful of whales and dolphins will emerge. Segment history suggests that the revenue generated from that last group more than compensates for the loss of the first group. | |} ---- I'm not your enemy, I'm not here to beg for WS to be B2P/F2P, I really don't care what model is used. I only wanted to shed some light on why vast amount of gamers these days are done with sub-base games. Share with you all my opinion is what I came here to do. I admire loyality that some of you have for WildStar by the way. Just because you're willing to spend just as much money at some eat-joint doesn't mean others or I would justify it. Just like I won't, anymore / evermore, paying huge sums of money (5 full games worth) per year for one game. I also want to thank you for not coming off hard on me or bashing me. Also, in all honesty, even if WS adopted B2P or a F2P (let's hope F2P wouldn't be adopted) I probably won't come back to WS (some folks have already written the game off as history). I have far too much on my plate game wise anyways. I'll probably lock my self in my house when StarCitizen comes out LOL. | |} ---- Q1 15 is not release yet. Games have their pop numbers goes up and down for sure and esp around Q4, christmass, and also around content updates. I'm glad to hear that folks are coming back for a month or two and checking out the net content. It's funny though how a lot of players will complain about these F2P folks wanting a free ride when they're spending 20 bucks a pop for CREDD which is you all buying game money from those same free players LOL. | |} ---- CREDD is a good system for sure and a great way to keep those gold sellers away. Really all games need to have this system! So a CREDD like system is coming to WoW? That's awesome to hear but that game is a JOKE to me anyways. | |} ---- I'm not saying you are. I'm simply saying that, if someone REALLY wants the game to go F2P/B2P, that's the way it can happen. Right now, people that want to spend more money than the sub fee can buy CREDD. Obviously, if that's not enough, then what will happen will be, by definition, P2W. Everything that can be bought with plat right now, you can theoretically buy CREDD and use that money for it. If we're talking about a system outside CREDD, we're talking exclusive cash shop items that need people spending a lot of money on them. Like a casino for high rollers to roll on gift bags. Wildstar's audience is a bit more savvy than that, I think; they're not going to be able to foist the Boom Box for real money promising that if we open a lot we'll eventually get a Luminous Equivar. That's why F2P always, inevitably, slides into P2W and superior gear on the cash shop. That's actually how the system generates any money at all. I'm a guy with money that really appreciates getting everything for 15$ a month. And why not? Why are we all in a rush to take things that are being developed for us now and lock them behind a pay wall so we can pay more, when there are obviously other options? There are only so many whales in the world, and there's a VERY good reason I don't play SW:TOR. It's the same reason I won't play this game if they make my subscription a formality. I pay 15$ a month for the game I get, and neither NCSoft or Carbine seem to think that's too little for me to pay for a game. What people are suggesting they do is take the development hours we've bought, then make us either pay more for them or not get them at all. It's an inherently predatory system that directly targets players and forces us to make a lose-lose decision, pay more or get less. I'd go elsewhere. I've seen enough of these scams to recognize them on sight; nothing is free. If NCSoft wants to go whaling, they won't do it with me. I'm here to play, not shop at the Mall of Wildstar. | |} ---- Just playing devil's advocate for a second here, not that he needs one, but isn't this essentially a pay-to-win situation? Just because you call them subscribers doesn't mean they aren't paying for an advantage. Edited February 12, 2015 by dinwitt | |} ---- Is it? Isn't pay-to-win by definition placing everyone on the ground floor and forcing them to pay to win? In my scenario, the norm is a subscription, there is no scale-up in money spent. 15 dollars a month buys everything that month, it buys this game as it is. It becomes the baseline. My issues are a bit less severe with actually-pay-a-sub-to-get-to-baseline. That's not really the same thing as far as I'm concerned, because you aren't paying for an advantage, you're receiving a marked disadvantage from the norm for not paying. For what it's worth, I think both F2P and B2P are horrible ideas that shouldn't have any player's support. I think both are abjectly horrifying concepts meant to turn games into commercials for their own cash shops, games that essentially turned into what I saw on late night advertisements on TV when I was 10 and it was legal to have that much fine print underneath giving things away for "free". I'm not necessarily even for my own idea because in no way, shape, or form would I ever find myself fool enough to support that kind of a change. It baffles me that anyone thinks we should make a decision between paying more than we're paying now or getting less than we're paying now is something we should applaud. My gut reaction is to froth at the mouth and tell these people they don't have a damn clue what they're talking about, and that the idea of "free-to-play" games has intrinsically hurt the idea of development and the value we place on development in the game's industry. But, that's not what I do. I have to try to be mature and think of solutions, not simply spit my visceral gut reactions. And, inherently, if people are really interested in putting in a free option because they think the influx of players is really going to help, it is only fair of me to consider the proposal and make some kind of rational and logical suggestion about the terms under which I would find that idea acceptable. And, as a subscriber, I have to say that, if a free option beyond CREDD needs to be installed, the system as I've outlined it does not directly affect my gameplay, will likely reduce or nullify the impact on development focus, and essentially keeps the train rolling as it has been, only people can choose to have Dr. Scholls flashing a banner in their face if they don't want to pay a subscription. No, I don't think it's smart for us to ask for it and I'd eternally wonder why people put up with cash-gouging games anyway, but it could feasibly be installed in that manner where it doesn't affect me or the other subscribers or CREDD users. We would technically continue as we have, we wouldn't have to deal with any kind of pay wall or P2W because we would still be the baseline and get everything developed for our investment (or in locus investment). The short and long of it is that F2P and B2P are, in my personal opinion, the video game equivalent of an infomercial hawker trying to sell something for free that you know is going to cost you more money in the long run. At the same time, it's not fair to use my personal opinion as a bludgeon; if someone wants F2P, it's incumbent upon me to provide terms I think are fair and acceptable as a counter-proposal. | |} ---- This is bullcrap. F2P Games end up "pay to win" and seperior gear in the cash shop because companies want money and people are willing to pay money to win. It's false to claim that F2P 'inevitably' ends up pay to win, because that's simply not true. It's bad business and cheap players that cause that to happen, not the model itself. In truth, the best idea is monitizing vanity, because vanity items are infinitely reusable content when done right, and people like to collect these things. Mounts, pets, Appearence skins, character persona customizations, these are the things that EVERYONE buys and wants to buy, especially in social games. People in social games want to buy vanity items a lot of times because others have them. However Pay to win only directly appeals to Whales, and low skill players with money. Vanity itemization appeals to mostly everyone. League of Legends for example, just goes to show how greatly they can monetize vanity systems. TERA Sells vanity itemization like crazy, some people even buying huge high price bundles of vanity items that are equivalent to the price of full release games. | |} ---- Game performance seems fine to me. I don't know of anyone that has issues with optimization since the fixes. Maybe it's your computer? Just maybe, that could be the answer... In terms of F2P - there's this thing called C.R.E.D.D. Use it. | |} ---- I do, WildStar has really crap ass performance. I can run Battlefield 4 and Tomb Raider 2013 at higher frame rates at maxed graphics. | |} ---- Can still be your hardware. Especially if you're running AMD or laptop hardware, yes even if it's your fancy Alienware. Wildstar had issues, but they have been improving a lot with each Drop. Their biggest issue still seems to be the netcode and server stability sometimes. And their ISP. | |} ---- Most raiders report a lot of performance issues, even on extremely high end hardware. Constant restarts reloadui and generally low FPS problems still plague the game, reguardless of hardware. WildStar still performs very poorly even on Nvida hardware. Far lower performance than what's expected of such a low shader/graphics complexity game engine. Guild Wars 2 vastly outperforms WildStar due to its optimization efforts, quite fantastically. I can max out the game as high as possible with supersampling and still get above 60FPS everywhere in Eyefinity, WildStar needs to follow suit with optimization. | |} ---- "most raiders" report issues in specific rooms due the way shading, lightning and particles function in that room. "most raiders" also report issues with the connection towards the servers during raiding and the instance server not being able to handle the load. The game actually runs fine on most Nvidia hardware if people actually setup their systems as they're supposed to be. Yes Wildstar does not like AMD, Yes Wildstar does not like SLI, yes WildStar does not like I7s with hyperthreading. First problem lies with the way AMD CPUs handle threads and AMD not changing their drivers accordingly. SLI is causing more problems in other games too, not sure if this is a SLI problem or the graphics libraries not supporting it properly I7s should not be used for gaming in the first place, their usage is something totally different. Guild Wars 2 has been around quite longer and actually had time to perform optimizations based on feedback. Oh wait, they didn't. Let's do another crab invasion in the Capital city and make the game unplayable for everyone, yay! I can run any game above 90 FPS as well, and WildStar humms happily on 75FPS. So what are you trying to say with this? | |} ---- ---- "that room" What does that even mean... lol... That's kinda funny, because tons of overclockers and custom PC builders choose i7's for their gaming rigs... Perhaps you should wander over to http://www.overclock.net/ | |} ---- Thanks honey, but I'm a member for quite a long time there already. moderator edit: content Edited February 12, 2015 by Chillia | |} ---- This is such an uneducated statement it's not even funny. The game is running mighty fine on my i7 2600 +GTX780, it's not even sweating since the game does a great job at loading all the heavy work onto the GPU. I have my own suspicions as to why the fps takes a significant hit in certain areas, I think the game just lacks occluders where needed or handles them pretty badly and has your GPU/CPU draw objects, decor, players or the scenery where they can't actually be seen (behind walls and such). Where is she being hostile?! Would you please stop being so obnoxious with your text formats, it makes me not want to quote you... | |} ---- ---- ---- I just put them on ignore and walked away. It doesn't help to continue talking to someone when all they seem to do is find any reason to argue. It's not worth the time and effort. Those who know better know better, and we all are aware that WildStar is in need of optimization, still. It's glaringly obvious. The game shouldn't run this poorly, but it's a 1st party engine so there's not much we as players can do. | |} ---- ----